Posted
by
timothyon Sunday March 09, 2014 @11:21PM
from the at-what-margin-do-you-pivot? dept.

There's been some positive news in the last year (and the last few) for American cellphone customers: certainly there's more visible competition for their business among the largest players in the market. Nonetheless, the Wall Street Journal reports that while more competition may translate into some more attractive service bundles, flexibility in phone options, or smoother customer service, it doesn't actually mean that the customers are on average reaping one of the benefits that competition might be expected to provide: lower price. Instead, the bills for customers on the major wireless providers have actually gone up, if not dramatically, in recent months — which means U.S. cell service remains much more expensive than it is in many other countries. The article could stand a sidebar on MVNOs and other low-cost options, though -- I switched to one of these from AT&T, and now pay just under $40 for one version of the new normal of unlimited talk and text, plus quite limited (1GB) data, but still using AT&T towers. Has your own cost to talk gone up or down?

Yeah except you can't keep that price and get a decent handset, that's why I just switched the wife over to Republic Wireless, same $25/month but she can use a non-sucky phone (Moto X) instead of her cruddy Optimus V on Virgin Mobile plus she now gets unlimited voice, twice as much data, and roaming to Verizon.

I pay $13.99/mo (no taxes/fees). $10/mo to ATT MVNO Airvoice for 250min/mo with rollover (which I never come close to using all of), Google Voice for all my SMS (unlimited) and the rare times I'm not on WIFI I have a $3.99/mo Freedompop 3g/4g Mifi (free if only 4g but Wimax coverage is spotty so I pay for 3g). The Mifi is only 1GB/mo, but like I said, it's rare I'm on in WIFI coverage anyway.

Just for the fun of it my data - from Estonia:- i pay ~$5 for "unlimited" data (Actually my speed will be capped to EDGE speeds after 5GB - but i never use that much)- i have chosen to pay by the minute (~$0.02/min). That rarely exceeds another $5 as most my calls are free (family+coworkers)

So all in all about 10$ a month.

Also - i practically never use SMS/MMS, but jabber/facetime/fb chat/hangouts instead.

Certainly the best network will vary depending on location. A buddy of mine works up in Alaska where apparently AT&T is the way to go and Verizon is useless. Here in Oregon at my parents' house and my family's cabin Verizon is the only network that has any signal.

Is that per month? It seems expensive. It depends on your needs, of course, but as I'm a light mobile user I end up paying about $60 AUD per year for my mobile service. For my usage it's a really good fit. Sadly the plan I'm on is no longer offered to new customers.

Does your plan give you unlimited texts, unlimited data, and 300 minutes of talk? I thought not. For most users, VM at $35 is a good fit.

At that level of usage, you might look at Page Plus (VZW MVNO); I pay $10 3 times a year for (each of) my kids' phones. It's 10c/min but no additional taxes (there is a 50c deduction per month service fee), so they basically get 20min/mo with roll-over. Not sure it would be any better for you, but the coverage is great (statistically) and I think it's always worth looking at options.

You can use any post-paid VZW phone except the iPhone (last I checked, they might be able to use the iPhone now, doesn't

I live in Saskatchewan. We have Sasktel, Bell, Telus, Rogers and the "spinoffs" (Fido, Koodo, 7-11's SpeakOut).

My current plan is with Telus. $60/mo for unlimited nationwide talk (unlimited to anywhere in Canada, from anywhere in Canada), unlimited sms/mms, with 5GB of sharable Data. My wife also has the exact same plan, so we have a total of 10GB of usable data between the two of us. After 911 fee's and taxes, we are paying $133.24 total. As it stands this is about as good as it gets for my needs.

I was with Sasktel for many years until last July/2014. We were locked into a 3 year contract, and paying $60/mo each for 300 local daytime minutes, unlimited local calling in the evenings,unlimited SMS (but not MMS, those were $1.00 each), and "unlimited" data. One gotcha they didn't tell you, is they also charged an $7-$8 "system access fee" on top of your plan, plus 911 fee's and taxes. In total we were paying ~$155/month. This does not account for overage or long distance fee's we would end up paying most months.

You can configure your Nexus 5, and specific apps and services on it, to not use mobile data in the background. In Settings -> Data Usage scroll down and you will see apps. Select the app, scroll down again and you will see the setting "restrict background data". Check this box and it will stop using mobile data while the app is in the background. This is especially critical for things like Google+, where if you take one HD video it will try to sync it in the background and kill your monthly quota. My kids were making videos with my phone while I slept...

Ting looks like a nice deal, and enthusiastic support. I was very frustrated dealing with Sprint to acquire a SIM for my Nexus 5. They were abhorrent in person at three stores and in online chat as well. That kind of put me off. I did finally manage to get SIMs from Ting real easy like. But the experience put me off even of using Sprint towers.

Besides, T-mobile has been really nice to me. That's worth a few extra bucks.

Stay away from Microsoft Skype on your Nexus 5. It has a known issue that kills the battery. Imagine that.

We got a Nexus 5, and even with mobile data turned off, it still uses something like 10KB/day. That makes me really uneasy.

We contacted Ting support, and they assured us that there's a buffer in the billing so we wouldn't get charged for that data. Yes, but that's not the point. Why are we using mobile data even when it's explicitly turned off at the phone? What are we sending or receiving? Tracking information?

We're still a lot happier with Ting than we were with Verizon, and the Nexus rocks, but I get re

Ting is decent, but it could be better. Trying to achieve zero data usage, I found that the smartphone came preloaded with crapware that insists on checking in daily. It's only a few bytes, but that's enough to bump the user into the next bucket. Only way I could stop it was by disabling data transmission entirely. Configuring the individual apps not to check for updates or otherwise exchange data did not work. Only takes one rogue app to wreck that plan.

Hm. I'll add my cell service shopping story here I guess, since you mentioned Ting and the average geek.

About 3 years ago I signed a 2-year deal with Verizon for fully unlimited LTE speeds on the then-awesome HTC Thunderbolt. Once I discovered Twitch TV my monthly streaming went up from about 9 gigs per month (Pandora, YouTube, other radio streaming, etc.) to around 18. And since I got grandfathered in to an unlimited plan, I couldn't make any plan changes or update my phone without getting shoved into an

I was on contract with T-Mobile: a family plan and one phone (out of 4) 18 months through its 2-year contract (the other 3 were past their 2-year contract period). T-Mobile allowed me to switch immediately to their monthly plans, with a reduction of about $60/month.

I switched from Sprint to Ting, a Sprint MVNO that does strict PAYGO. $6/mo per connected device and charges for talk, text, and data based solely on usage in a given month; if I talk less next month my bill goes down, if I use more data it goes up.

My phone bill for two devices is around half per month what Sprint charged us.

--Serious question, can anyone recommend an good AT&T MVNO in south Texas? I have a *dumb* phone, and AT&T is killing me @ ~$64/month for unlimited voice + text only, with NO data plan. They're way overcharging me @$20/mo for unlimited text. I've considered Solavei but not sure my phone would make the transition - I don't need an iPhone or Android. TIA

I don't understand how businesses are allowed to tack on fees to bills without disclosing these fees in their prices. Somehow they can't quote these fees when you are booking the service, but they can calculate them when billing for the services.

Some years ago, I rented a car from a large airport and one of the fees tacked on was for the property taxes paid on the car. Why don't they just tack on another fee for the property tax on their buildings, or their staff costs, car depreciations? These are all costs that must be paid by the business whether or not I had rented the car -- just like the property taxes on the car.

I am just waiting for prices for cellphone and car rental services to be $1 with the rest of the cost as "taxes and fees".

I don't understand how businesses are allowed to tack on fees to bills without disclosing these fees in their prices. Somehow they can't quote these fees when you are booking the service, but they can calculate them when billing for the services.

That's right, this should definitely be illegal. Airlines played those games for years and years ($50 ticket fee, but with taxes it works out to $100 or maybe even $300). A rather recent regulation had ended that crap [nytimes.com]

Trouble with this is the carriers won't be able to run national ads with their pricing. Instead the price will have to be concealed until you're about to sign up. Some states (Nevada) you pay around 7%, whereas others (I think NY?) it's 25%. I'm still trying to figure out why the government finds it necessary to make a cell phone so expensive to have, even if your income is shit.

Trouble with this is the carriers won't be able to run national ads with their pricing. Instead the price will have to be concealed until you're about to sign up. Some states (Nevada) you pay around 7%, whereas others (I think NY?) it's 25%.

If it were purely taxes that the company must collect and hand over based purely on what you pay, I could agree with that, but when it is nebulous "fees" that are really cost of doing business that the company incurs, it's not reasonable. Furthermore, some of the fees relate to Federal fees that are the same in all states.

In the example I was quoting (renting a car at an airport), the company has enough information to quote the exact price with all fees at the time of booking.

Exactly. Here in NY, the tax rate is 8.25%. If a cell phone carrier was advertising $100 a month for their plans, I could easily add in taxes and come up with a $108.25 real cost. I'd have no problem if this was the only "below the line" fee that they added in. However, they add in a ton of other things that are basically costs of doing business. By the time I need to multiply in the 8.25% tax, we're talking $130 instead of $100. Somehow, Amazon and other major retailers are able to sell items nationw

There are several reasons. One reason is that by putting in these line items for things such as 911 fee and FCC fee, they make it appear as though they are not the ones charging you the fee and they should not be blamed for it. A second reason is that by putting these out there as line items they can lie about their prices and appear to be cheaper than the competition.

All of their excuses are BS. For proof, I submit prepay as evidence. If you "charge" your T-Mobile account with a $30 card, it never costs more than $30/month for whatever service they are advertising, regardless of the market you are in.

Some of these perks are necessary in the federal system that the United States adopted in the 1780s. How else should carriers advertise across state lines when these regulatory costs differ from state to state?

Why is it more important that advertisers have the ability to advertise a single price all over the country than consumers being able to easily tell what something actually costs once they're in a store?
This seems like a really weird (or at least one-sided) argument.

Because the American consumer market exists to service the moneyed interests, of course. Duh. Did you think that it was there to provide consumers with quality, competitive services at a reasonable cost? That's cute.

Trouble with this is the carriers won't be able to run national ads with their pricing. Instead the price will have to be concealed until you're about to sign up. Some states (Nevada) you pay around 7%, whereas others (I think NY?) it's 25%. I'm still trying to figure out why the government finds it necessary to make a cell phone so expensive to have, even if your income is shit.

They could still run nationwide ads with the net price but quote the correct amount before you sign up.

I beat an auto repair shop on an extra fees scam some years ago. Got a quote for a muffler replacement, and used it. After the work, they tacked on this extra $15 fee for "shop materials". That shop materials fee seems to be a common scam in the DFW area. When I objected, they trotted out the tired old justification that everyone does it, it's standard practice, etc. Also tried to claim it was a government requirement. EPA, you know. I pointed out that they had not included this cost on the quote, and they should have. That backed them off, and they dropped that extra charge.

It's relentless. Just because a business is big and well-known is no assurance they won't stoop to outright theft and try to pass it off as necessary or customary. Once had AT&T try to charge me a fee for dropping long distance service while keeping local. A fee for dropping a service? Ridiculous! When I complained to them, they tried to tell me that a particular law said they were allowed to charge this fee, so tough. I told them I didn't give a rats ass what some miserable obscure law said, as they'd doubtless pushed it through with bribes and lobbying, and warned them I would complain to the FCC if they didn't back down. They didn't, so I did. Evidently the complaint worked. AT&T responded by refunding the fee in the interests of "customer relations" while in no way admitting any fault.

The problem of ripoffs and poor service always seems to crop up wherever competition is lacking, and telecomms companies in the US certainly do not have enough competition. Ma Bell was an evil monopolist until their forced breakup in 1984, which it turned out, didn't help much. Today, telecomms in the US are still uncompetitive, price gouging, regulatory capturing, sluggish, backwards scum.

The problem of ripoffs and poor service always seems to crop up wherever competition is lacking, and telecomms companies in the US certainly do not have enough competition. Ma Bell was an evil monopolist until their forced breakup in 1984, which it turned out, didn't help much. Today, telecomms in the US are still uncompetitive, price gouging, regulatory capturing, sluggish, backwards scum.

I don't know how old you are but Ma Bell was nowhere near as evil as today's AT&T and Verizon. Ma Bell was a regul

I don't know how old you are but Ma Bell was nowhere near as evil as today's AT&T and Verizon.

Bullshit they weren't. My father and grandfather worked for Ma Bell for over 50 years between the two of them (both as line installers and in engineering) and I'm old enough to remember them pre-breakup. I've seen them operated behind the scenes and my father can tell you in great detail what a bunch of evil pricks they could be.

Ma Bell was a regulated monopoly with many constraints on what it could do.

Regulated yes. Constrained? Not so much. AT&T had vast power back in the day. Certainly more than Verizon and AT&T do currently, who BTW are also still regulated quasi

AT&T got absorbed by Southwestern Bell Corporation (SBC) in 2005. Which is pretty much the worst of the baby bells split off from the original Bell System. They adopted the AT&T name, in part because theirs has a rather bad reputation, but the underlying company is SBC along with the bits of AT&T that they kept. So it is really SBC that is buying up everything not the company formerly known as AT&T.

My recollection of the old Ma Bell isn't as rosy as yours. You used to have to rent the telephone from them. You were not allowed to work on the phone wiring in your own home. I can remember being charged a non-trivial amount to have a phone line in my parents home repaired. Because it wasn't allowed for me to do it and unless you bought their in home wiring insurance policy you had to pay Ma Bell to come do it. Before the break up I can remember it costing something like $2 a minute to call my grandmother in Illinois from Virginia. My dad used to stand there while we talked and time the call because he could only afford so much time per month. Before the break up my father wanted a new phone Ma Bell quoted him over $200. We didn't get it because it was so costly. A couple of years later after the break up that exact phone was sold under the AT&T brand name for $19.99.

The break up may have allowed many questionable practices but it also brought costs for the average person way down. The worst practices seem to be more related to the industry consolidating than to the initial breakup.

>. Ma Bell was an evil monopolist until their forced breakup in 1984, which it turned out, didn't help much.

Really? How are you paying $2 to $6 when everyone else in America now pays a fraction of a cent? The breakup did in fact help. You do not need to lease/rent your telephones from Ma Bell, you can add as many phones as you want and you can pick your choice of voice carriers - including free VOIP providers if their offerings fit your needs. The "videophone" is now reality and most of us bave far more

Generally the answer is that the fees in question are something being collected for a third party. Usually the Government. Taking a quick look at my mobile bill, this is in the US, for this month I see five fees. Communications Sales Tax, State & Local Sales Tax, Federal Universal Service Fund, Regulatory Surcharge and State 911 Fee. All of which are taxes. So in my view it is just like how you buy a bunch of stuff at the store and have to keep track of the sales tax that they are going to tack on at t

Landline sound quality in 1975 was better than any mobile phone sound quality in 2014.

"Hi, I'd like to get directions on how to mmmRAWWWWW BOAWWWAAHH URRRBBEE URBEEE BUMPH RAWWWWLLLL at the corner of Park Street. Hello? I said, I want to get dir--fwwwwzzzzEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE URPP *crackle* ffffffFAZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ EEEP Park street."

The telecom companies raise prices, pocket the money and let their service rot, and the customers just keep shoveling cash at them.

Landline sound quality in 1975 was better than any mobile phone sound quality in 2014.

This suprises you somehow? A landline provides a lot more bandwidth without any worries of signal interferance from walls or other radio sources. The switches were also analog, no need for converting analog sound into digital bits, compressing and then sending them in discreete packets.

This suprises you somehow? A landline provides a lot more bandwidth without any worries of signal interferance from walls or other radio sources. The switches were also analog, no need for converting analog sound into digital bits, compressing and then sending them in discreete packets.

Analog phone service sounds better than digital landline - because it was all analog and very little filtering happened. Then in the mid-70's or so AT&T was switching to digital systems. They did research (heavily) into finding out what bandwidth they could limit to and still have intelligible speech, which was decided that the good chunk of human vocalizations exist below 4kHz or so.

This gave rise to the 8KHz sampling with 8 bits (or a 64kbps channel), uncompressed. Which is why our phone systems use 64kbps channel allocations. (56k modems were derived from the fact that every 8th byte or so, a bit was robbed from the audio and used for control purposes. Since you could never tell when this happened, they assumed you only had a 7-bit channel).

Of course, that voice is carried at a full 64kbps. GSM and other digital mobile telephony only really have datarates of 4kbps or lower, necessitating use of highly compressed, highly distorting codecs meant to get the most out of every bit - and let the brain do a lot of the error correction and such (speech has low enough entropy that the powerful organic audio processor running rather advanced wet software can do very good forward error correction to extract out what is being said, despite all the distortion).

Of course, with 3G and LTE and such, codecs are available that let you use more bandwidth to get higher audio quality, but like all things, it requires both ends to support it.

The telecom companies raise prices, pocket the money and let their service rot, and the customers just keep shoveling cash at them.

New codecs were developed for 3G service and *supposedly mobile calling has gotten better.

The GSM codec is AMR-WB [wikipedia.org] and the CDMA codec is called EVRC-NW [wikipedia.org].Some networks aren't going to switch over until LTE (aka real 4G) is fully deployed and it requires both ends of the call to support the codec.

YMMV

*depending on whether or not it's been enabled in your area/on your provider.

Landline sound quality in 1975 was better than any mobile phone sound quality in 2014.

Do you really want to go back to 1975? There was no such thing as mobile service. There also was for all practical purposes no data service. There was no voice mail and no answering machines. Text messaging didn't exist and email wasn't available outside of academia and some research labs. You had precisely one company to deal with in the US (AT&T) and they're weren't exactly friendly what with them being a monopoly and all. You would get charged an obscene amount of money to call anyone more than a few miles from your house and you didn't even want to think about the cost of calling someone outside your country. Rotary dial [wikipedia.org] phones were still commonplace. And I'm old enough to remember all this.

Yeah they had voice service that was optimized for voice and nothing else. Cell phones might have their problems but I'm not exactly eager to turn the clock back.

With the discount for on-time payments, I pay $35 for unlimited talk, text, and web on the Sprint network. That's no contract, so certainly good prices are available.

Of course, many people pay $85 for the phone subsidy that comes with a three year contract. An extra $50 / month will certainly increase the bill. $50 for 36 months is $1,800 for a "free" phone that's worth $250. No thanks. I don't recall how often you can get a new phone subsidized, but if it's a $200 credit once a year and people are payin

My bill with Verizon dropped 40% after I threatened to switch carriers. Cell phone plans are a beautiful example of how prices are set based on the market's willingness to pay, not on the actual cost of the good or service.

Expect prices to continue to rise as companies employ more and more psychologists and statisticians to extract the absolute maximum amount of wealth from their consumers.

I've been ready to split to a MVNO for my two phones, both out of contract and no need to upgrade anytime soon. Even went through unlocking process with ATT. I was getting ready to do it last month but life happened, but I was able to get the website to take my $120 service (unlimited minutes, texts, 1GB data) down to $90. It was the same plan - and irritated me that it didn't just automatically move me. Then I log in today, and they actually have applied another discount without my intervention - now my monthly service is $65. They also seem to be applying my company discount differently - before it used to only be on the phone plan portion of the bill, now it seems to be applying over my entire bill which is bringing it down that low. It's saving me about 7-8 extra bucks calculated this way.

So over two billing cycles my phone bill has dropped by nearly half. And all I did was click a different plan the first month, and this month I didn't do anything at all. Coincidentally, $65 was the price I was finding for the other services I had explored as alternatives. So, I've never had a problem with service (except on a visit to LA once, it was awful - maybe the smog? Lol) and I've gotten the price I was going to get without the hassle of changing anything. I'm going to keep a very close eye on my bill to make sure it doesn't creep up again, but I'm a happy camper all of a sudden.

Not always. For example, airline deregulation was a good thing. "In 1974 the cheapest round-trip New York-Los Angeles flight (in inflation-adjusted dollars) that regulators would allow: $1,442. Today one can fly that same route for $268." -- Stephen Breyer, who worked with Ted Kennedy on airline deregulation in the 1970s

With tax rates, like with prices charged to consumers, there's a sweet spot that maximizes long-term government revenue. A government that goes above that rate is being worse than unfair;

I haven't taken a look at plans in the past year, but a year ago I looked at all of the plans available to find the cheapest possible service for someone that doesn't have many needs.
I ended up with TMobile pay as you go plan. They had a unique feature that if you put $100 on your account, the money would stay in your account for 1 year. $100 a year for a cell phone service is hard to beat.
This obviously won't work for someone that uses their phone quite a bit, but it is perfect for someone that can mostly use land lines and wireless internet. It's also perfect for a child whom you want to give a phone, but make them responsible for their own account balance.

I don't go out that much, thankfully. I have a Nexus 4 on a T-Mo SIM, replacing an Xperia Play (hey, it was a hundred bucks all in, including replacing the back plate.) Which is now my SIP phone, and I pay around ten bucks a month for that.

The plan I'm using costs $2/day for unlimited everything, only on the days when you use it. It only has EDGE but the $3/day plan has fancier mobile data. Much of my driving around is in the sticks where the 3G coverage is crap anyway, and this is adequate for navigation w

You missed the good part of the T-Mobile PAYGO plan: once you have paid the $100 once (or accumulated it via smaller payments), all your future added minutes last a year. So if you haven't used $100, you can top off with $50, or even $10, at the end of the first year, and it roll the leftover minutes forward to the next year and add the new minutes. If you buy fewer minutes, you are paying a bit higher price per minute, but you never lose the old minutes as long as you top off. This is why the original

There are options from most of the carriers. I'm doing the Republic Wireless $10 unlimited talk and text, [republicwireless.com] but with no data. Having a 4G phone with no data sucks, but the price is compelling, and I should be able to add a prorated data plan for the times when I expect I do need it. Having WiFi calls when I'm at a place with no cell reception is also nice. However, counting the phone, my bill is higher than if I had been able to keep my dumbphone on somebody's T-mobile family plan.

Ting [ting.com] is a great choice for Sprint, Airvoice [airvoicewireless.com] is a great choice for AT&T, PagePlus [pagepluscellular.com] is decent for Verizon.

One interesting option is FreedomPop, [freedompop.com] but they seem to be in beta. Earlier versions of FreedomPop phones had poor performance and very poor voice quality, but they're supposedly improving. It would be interesting to see if they go anywhere with that.

For several years now I've been paying $80 per year for 2,000 minutes with Page Plus. I usually have a few hundred minutes left over at the end of the year, and leftover minutes are retained with continuous service. I've been pretty happy.

My friends tell me that once I get a girlfriend, my low phone bills will be history. However, I've been enjoying my cheap phone service and laughing at my friends with girlfriends for years now.

Wifi? I pay for data, but the fact is that I don't really need to. Most of the time, I'm either sitting at work (with Wifi) or sitting at home (with Wifi). Even the train stations are plastered with "Xfinity" and friends.

Good for a second line- but not something I'd like to count on. Also- my credit card company could process the touchkeys on the menu- but not when I entered the credit card number! Wierd, eh?

Possibly the MJ uses SIP INFO DTMF (or the equivalent) and the DTMF isn't being generated on the other end properly, or alternately, it doesn't and your DTMF sounded like poop and the menu system could handle it but some cc system you were handed off to couldn't.

Here in Australia I pay $19.99 per month and get $300 worth of cap value to use on everything except international calls, premium rate calls/SMS and international roaming. (3 services I never use)

I also get 1000 minutes per month free calls to other people on the same MVNO plus 1GB of included data.

I pay 40c per 30sec and 35c flagfall for normal voice calls, 25.3c for SMS, 50c for international SMS, 50c for national MMS, 75c for international MMS, 0.2c for 10kb data (above the 1GB included in my plan). $1.0

Here in Australia I pay $19.99 per month and get $300 worth of cap value to use on everything except international calls, premium rate calls/SMS and international roaming. (3 services I never use)

G'Day, Australian here.

Allow me to explain how this works for our American friends.

For the GP's $20 real Australian dollars he doesn't get $300 real Australian dollars worth of value, what he gets are $300 imaginary dollars. Australian telco's do this to obfuscate the real cost of services. So they can continue to pretend that a single SMS costs $0.25 and one minute of talk time costs $1.50 or data actually costs $0.20 per MB. In reality that cost is less than 1/15th of the advertised cost. The money has no real value in the outside world and is only valid for 30 days (or however long is stipulated by the contract). This way telco's can continue to confound the ACCC and regular consumers and bold faced lie about the true cost of services.

I'm with Telstra who are shamelessly Australia's most expensive telco... but I don't mind. I'm on a pre-paid plan (PAYG) and for $30 real Australian dollars I get $250 imaginary dollars as well as 400 MB of data for 30 days. Phone calls are $0.90 per minute and SMS's are $0.29, but in reality I'm paying $0.06 per minute for voice calls and $0.019 per SMS taking into account that at $2 per MB the data is 45% of my cap. However if Telco's advertised the real cost of services, they wouldn't be able to get away with charging $0.30 per SMS in real Australian dollars when post-paid (contract) customers go over their cap (feel free to Google "Bill Shock" for sensationalist tabloid pieces about this).

This is a far cry from some places where if you have so much as 1 Peso on your account you can send infinite SMS's. However in that land I also swapped towers 3 times walking from one end of my hotel room to the other so I guess there's a trade off. I'm not all that unhappy with Australian prices, it's more the deceptive advertising that I have an issue with.

I pay just shy of $1200 for 2 years here in the US and get unlimited data. Actual, real, unlimited data on LTE (~7-10Mbps). Plus more minutes than I can use (which is fairly few, admittedly, when you consider most of my minutes are free since their to same-carrier phones).

Oh, and I get a new $800 phone every 2 years included in that price. So, on balance, about $16.67/mo if you count the phone. I'd go for the "bundled" internet to get a discount, but my carrier's internet isn't all that fast. If I quit at a

Baiscally the phone companies seem to want one's cellular bill to hover around the "magical" $100/month.

You can get 2, 3 , even 4 lines for $100/month.

But try to get a $25-35 plan for a single line?Pfft. Yeah, right. Like that was going to happen.

And Sprint is trying to upsell my company. We're grandfathered into a plan with no data caps. They keep trying to sell us a plan that's just SLIGHTLY above our current data usage (and we know our data usage is only increasing). The grand total savings? $7/mon

Back last year I used AT&T upping their rates to get out of my contract, 6 months into a 2 year contract. Had them unlock my phone and took it to T-Mobile. They have a web-only plan for $30/month that gives unlimited text/data and 100 minutes. $20 for their startup fee that included the sim card and activation, and another $20 to port the number to google voice and using that over data instead of minutes, I'm on unlimited everything for $30/month.

Using the same here, but sadly they've recently blocked tethering -- even if you're just tethering an Android tablet to your Android phone. (So effectively, simply increasing your screen size.) That rather kills the deal, for me -- unlimited data is pointless when you can only use that data on the phone itself.

Here mobile calls have already a lot of competition and some obscure operators more oriented to foreign people (go figure) give you extremely good rates like 7 euros/month call anyone you want, or just pay a load every 3 months. I estimate I am spending 5 euros/months for the mobile bill. The bill you can find with the official operators is around 15 euros/month, and if cheaper they rip you off in the cost of the calls. Mobile Internet is an huge rip off, and the magic number is (again) 15 euros for the ba

I recommend Republic Wireless. $25/month gets you unlimited 3G (5 Gigs, then throttled to 2G) data, voice and texting on the Sprint Network. You have to purchase the phone outright (Moto X) and they hope but don't absolutely require that you offload to WiFi. The WiFi turns out to be a great feature because you can make calls and send texts seamlessly--great if you work in a basement or live in a bad cell area like I do.
I wrote a blog posting about my experience here: http://www.eroncohen.com/2013/... [eroncohen.com]

I pay $30/month for 25 hours of talk and text with T-Mobile, but there's hardly a data plan (I think it's, like, 30mb/month). Suits me well since I don't use a smartphone. As soon as you set foot into the data plans, that's when things start getting expensive I think.

I have been a long time customer of T-mobile, mainly because my brother and sister-in-law were in it and back then in-network and out-of-network mattered. But many of my friends switched to AT&T because their kids wanted iPhones.

One of them told me yesterday, "I think I should send T-mobile a donation. AT&T has cut my price in half because of T-mobile". He was paying 300$ for five lines. AT&T reduced it to 160$ for unlimited talk and text and 10GB of high speed data, combined data quota, and hot spot ability, free international roaming at 128 kbps, free international texts.

It is to be expected, there are no new killer must-have features on the new phones, and so the customers don't feel the need to run on the upgrade treadmill. So they days of giving a "free" phone at some 200% margin in installments to the customers are gone. US cell phone market is trending towards sanity now.

Instead, the bills for customers on the major wireless providers have actually gone up, if not dramatically, in recent months — which means U.S. cell service remains much more expensive than it is in many other countries.

Bills may have gone up but that doesn't mean you are paying more for the same stuff. I'm paying less for voice but I'm paying more for data in total. I'm also paying less per byte in data than I used to but I'm using more of it. My first cell phone bill was around $40/month (15 years ago) and only included a "massive" 40 minutes/month of voice calls before expensive ($0.70/minute) overage minutes kicked in. My bill reached a peak of about $100/month/phone recently but now I'm paying about $70 per phone

What most of these posts don't advertise is their actual speed of connection. Today with smartphones, LTE should be standard. But most of these cheap plans are MVNO's reselling cheaper 3g plans as most major carriers don't resell their LTE plans only 3G/3G+/4G (latter being marketing). While fine for those driven primarily by cost, it's not ok for those that want speed. That and they use their own definition of "unlimited" or even the 2/3/5 GB plans they offer where they knock you down to Edge speeds af

That is because they have their fingers in their ears. I've been gradually getting everyone I know to switch to Ting like I did. Or at least, if they really do need an unlimited plan, telling them to stop using freaking overpriced Verizon or AT&T, because seriously why would you do that? Pay twice as much for worse service than one of the 50-bucks-or-so unlimited plans? I rarely use more than the smallest tier, though, so I definitely do *not* need an unlimited plan. As such, I generally pay Ting about

Because I buy no contract phones that are GSM I am part of the only real competitive network in North America. ATT vs T-Mobile. ATT's 3 billion contribution to my plan now means I pay $50 (1st line) + $30(2nd line) + $10(3rd) all with data, text and talk. Previously 2 lines cost me $175 under contract. Thank you ATT.

I'd consider an MVNO, but they can't beat my plan ($25 every 3 months). So I could get a smart phone and use data over WiFi when available. But I'm not sure if AT&T will pull their mandatory data plan B.S. even for wholesale customers. I just don't need data that much and I'm not likely to be shot for my flip-phone.

Moved from ATT to RepublicWireless, another Sprint MVNO, has plans from $5 to $40. Right now, Moto X is the only phone.

The problem with this whole article and your post is you don't give enough details. Most companies are now going to unlimited talk and text and only paying for data since most users now have smartphones. So what though if I get unlimited data for $10! If the speeds are edge or 3g or below, yeah it'll work for those that are watching costs primarily, but for many/most, their smartphone had better be fast and get good coverage.

Last I saw, ATT wasn't allowing the MVNO's to use their LTE antennas, only thei

Because they target their advertising in a very smart and effective way. I'm embarrassed to say that I probably would not have known about the great improvements in prepay if it weren't for the fact that I am friendly with the janitorial staff at work. I'm simply not exposed to the same kind of advertising that they are. They have all of these fantastic, cheap phone plans (and phones!) for low-income people but they manage to keep it mostly a secret from the majority of the mid to high income people. Most p

That line worked 10 years ago, but the pay phones are all gone. You need to pay a little bit per year to keep a phone in the glove box just for occasional use. Or you can do what my in-laws do and just borrow strangers' phones! LOL.

Tracfone is great for people with light usage; those who just want a phone in their pocket to make that emergency (or semi-emergency, like "I'm in the store now; what was that thing you wanted me to buy again?") call. It is far less valuable for people who regularly use their phone for long conversations. And its data and messaging rates (and service) are terrible.

Mind you, I fall into the former camp and am happy with my cheap TracFone. In those instances where I actually need to discuss things with people